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# 



J ^a; ipv % VnmUn^ 9$ If foist fa tytm< 

A SERMON, 



PREACHED BEFORE 



THE 



YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION 



OF 



NEW YOEK; 



AT THEIE 

TWELFTH AN NIVEKSAKY, 

MAY 8, 1864. 

BY 

RICHARD S. STORRS, JR., D.D. 

OF BKOOKLYN, NEW YOEK. 






PUBLISHED BY THE ASSOCIATION. 
1864. 



3X 1 4 33 



SERMON. 



ACTS 11 : 26, LAST CLAUSE. 

Fbom a remote antiquity the site occupied by the city of Antioch 
had been recognized by those who observed it as suitable for the seat 
of a large commercial town. Lying at the north-eastern, corner of 
the Mediterranean, almost exactly in the angle which the coast of 
Syria, running northward, there makes with the coast of Asia Minor, 
running eastward — only separated from the sea by a fruitful valley, 
twenty miles in length, through which flowed the river Orontes, navi- 
gable for the boats and vessels of that day, and having behind it the 
winding valley between the ranges of Taurus and Lebanon, through 
which alone, for many leagues, the trade of Asia could find access to 
the coast — it was marked out by nature for the uses of commerce, and 
the establishment of a centre of traffic and of wealth. And the wit of 
man was not slow to detect this, or the enterprise of man to avail 
itself of it. 

Antigonus laid the foundations of a town, three centuries before 
Christ, not far from where Antioch was afterwards to be. The Greek 
kings of Syria who succeeded him — instructed, it was said, by sacred 
auguries, and obeying the indications of an eagle's flight, which had 
borne a part of the royal sacrifice to some cliffs overhanging the val- 
ley and the river— changed the site as well the name of the town 
which Antigonus had not finished, established there their capital, and 
rapidly developed it into a gay and stately city, numerous in popula- 
tion, rich in resources, echoing with industry, thronged with trade, and 
early conspicuous for its luxury and splendor. By the Komans, 



4 

when they had dethroned the Seleucidae, and converted their kingdom 
into a province, this city was still further enlarged and enriched ; till, 
in the age of Augustus, preceding the time to which the text carries 
us, it was described by Strabo as including already four separate 
towns, each of which was important and opulent. By Antiochus 
Epiphanes the fourth of these had been added to the others. A 
temple to Jupiter Capitolinus had been built upon one summit, and 
a citadel on another; the ground had been levelled at the foot of 
mount Silpius for a superb imperial street, extending four miles 
across the breadth of the town, under continuous colonades ; and all 
the expanse of palaces and squares had been enclosed in a fortified 
wall. By Pompey it had been made a free city, and such it contin- 
ued until the reign of the first of the Antonines. Caesar had built in 
it an aqueduct and a basilica. Under Augustus, in the day of the 
geographer, a gay and brilliant suburb to it had been completed by 
Agrippa. Tiberius likewise contributed to the restoration of those 
parts of the town which alread} r were ancient, and the improvement 
of the modern. And even Caligula, that most desperate and brutal 
of imperial profligates, whose name had become in his own time the 
synonyme for every insane atrocity, before the dagger relieved the 
world of his detestable presence had also left his monument at An- 
tioch, in an aqueduct and baths. 

So stood the city — " the beautiful Antioch," as the Greeks already 
had learned to call it ; the " Queen of the East," as Pliny names it — 
1 almost an oriental Rome,' when Paul, as summoned from Tarsus 
by Barnabas, went thither to preach. 

The population assembled in it was of course most various, em- 
bracing representatives of man}' peoples. From the first the Jews — 
in the impulse of that new desire for traffic which, after their return 
from the captivity in Babylon, had carried them abroad into all the 
great cities — had settled at Antioch in large numbers ; so large, that 
already in the day of St. Paul they were allowed to be governed by 
an ethnarch of their own, and to enjoy an equivalent political privi- 
lege to that of the Greeks. The Greeks, meantime, in that spirit of 
restless and inquisitive activity which contrasted on the one hand 
the Egyptian immobility, and on the other the habitual reserve and 
dignity of the Roman, and which made the Greek the merchant, the 



5 

sailor, and the colonist of many countries in the centuries before 
Christ — the Greeks had firmly established at Antioch their arts, 
their trade, their festivals, their religion, and had made it as much a 
Hellenic city as was Ephesus or Smyrna ; almost as much so as was 
Athens itself. The Grecian ideas and habits prevailed in it ; and the 
Greek nature, fastidious but unchaste, always more solicitous for 
elegance in form than for truth and purity in precept and character, 
and which seems to have run to excess of riot as it roamed more 
widely from the ancient seats of its traditions and its ancestors — 
this, to a great extent, moulded the society and fashioned the forms 
of Antiochene life. It made that life brilliant and picturesque, but 
sensual in its philosophy, essentially atheistic in its faith, and prof- 
ligate in its customs, almost beyond the sad and famous example of 
Corinth. 

But these were not all of the residents at Antioch. They who 
had come from the Euphrates or the Indus on their immense jour- 
neys, with ivory, pearl, spices, silks, ebony, and precious stones, not 
unfrequently remained there when their traffic was accomplished, and 
added to all the other elements assembled in the city their oriental 
lassitude and passion. From the west also, as well as from the east, 
it derived continual increase of numbers. The capital of one of the 
great Roman provinces, the residence not of the governor alone, 
but of other officers of the imperial government, often was fixed there ; 
and the beautiful softness, the proverbial evenness and healthfulness 
of the climate, drew many after them, who came also from the west, 
for health or pleasure. Emperors themselves admired the charms of 
the brilliant town, the * Gate of the Orient ;' and almost regretted, 
in view of its bright and singular beauty, that the claims of state 
compelled their residence in the prouder metropolis. Cicero spoke 
of it, before St. Paul's day, in his defence of the rights of Archias, as 
a city already long celebrated and rich, abounding in learned men 
and most liberal studies ; and again, when thundering against Yerres 
and his crimes, his majestic invective softened into music as he spoke 
of the extent and opulence of the kingdom of which it was the capi- 
tal, and of the exceeding grace and splendor of the royal gifts 
brought from it to Rome. 

Amid such a population, in such a climate, luxurious and ener- 



6 

vating, with the vast wealth collected at this centre, and with all that 
was selfish and sensual in man's nature as yet untouched by the 
power of the Gospel, the general aspect of the social and public life 
there developed may be easily anticipated. The manifold rites and 
shows of heathenism were constantly exhibited, in their utmost vicious- 
ness, and their utmost pomp. Nowhere else was the theatre more 
splendid. The races, and all the athletic games which were cherish- 
ed by the Greeks, were celebrated at Antioch — at first at intervals, 
and afterwards regularly — at the public expense, with a magnificence 
not surpassed on the plains of Elis, or on the great Isthmus. They 
drew to themselves immense assemblages, and became the scenes of 
riotous festivity. All ornaments and appliances of the most sump- 
tuous and extravagant epicurean life were there copiously collected. 
A revenue of thirty thousand pounds, derived from the legacy of one 
wealthy Roman, was annually applied by the government to the 
public pleasures. Opulent citizens offered liberal largess to him 
who should invent or import a new luxury ; and the panders to pleas- 
ure, of every kind, flocked thither incessantly. 

Superstition, as well as sensualism, found its votaries at Antioch ; 
and the steps of those who claimed to declare the Invisible to man, 
crossed everywhere in the streets the pathways of those who sought 
to make the present city a paradise of every earthly delight. There 
were Chaldean astrologers, with their astrolabes and horoscopes; 
there were Jewish impostors, and professors of sorcery; there were 
dancing-girls from Persia and Egypt, artists from Greece, athletes 
from Italy, comedians, pantomimes, singers, wrestlers, the servants 
of luxury, the priesthood of lust, from every land. And there, in the 
suburbs, amid the thickets of laurel and of cypress, was that grove 
of Daphne, 'full of harmonious sounds and aromatic odors,' which 
Gibbon has described with pleased and lingering luxuriance of 
phrase, where the most continuous and unlimited licentiousness was 
prompted and enjoined as an ordinance of piety; where genius and 
wealth and religion had conspired to make the most delightful scene- 
ries of nature, embellished with the finest and costliest trophies of 
the later Greek ail, a very shrine and temple of perpetual vice. 

It was to this city, the very centre of heathenism, the very me- 
tropolis of splendid shows and of sensual joys, the Paris of the old 



world, without a single one of the names, institutions, sciences, hu- 
manities which have given a dignity to the Paris of the new— it was 
to this city, apparently so utterly and essentially opposed to all puri- 
fying influence, so characteristically antagonistic to the Gospel of 
Christ, that Paul had come, at the summons of his friend, to preach 
tha^t Gospel ; and here, as we are told, they who believed and com- 
panied with him were first called "Christians." It is easy to see 
how the name arose, and why at that precise point of history it first 
appeared. It was given undoubtedly as a name of derision ; and it 
is natural to remember, in connection with it, that the inhabitants 
of Antioch were noted in the old world for their scurrilous wit and 
their fondness for nicknames ; traits from which emperors themselves 
sometimes suffered, and of which, so late as three hundred years 
after, Julian the Apostate was made keenly sensible. The name, 
whose early element of reproach has been long since dissociated 
from it by the progress of the world, was given at just this time to 
the disciples, because the rapid extension of Christianity, and its pro- 
gressive interior development, gave occasion for some name by which 
to describe the new teachers and worshippers, and this was the one 
most readily suggested. 

So long as the apostles had preached to the Jews only, and had 
sought to convert those of their own race to faith in Jesus as the prom- 
ised Messiah, there was no need of a special name whereby to describe 
them. They were naturally recognized by both Greeks and Jews as 
only a new sect within the ancient Hebrew people. And that habit- 
ual and contemptuous aversion which other peoples felt towards the 
Hebrews was probably but intensified, where it was not displaced 
by utter ignorance, towards these obscure sectaries. But when they 
began, as now openly at Antioch, to preach to the Greeks and 
Romans also', and to gather converts from every nation as fast as 
they could reach th<j«i, admitting them to all the privilege of their 
communion without the initiatory rite of circumcision, and valuing 
the Gentiles who believed in Jesus far more than the Jews who 
rejected and had murdered him — when they began even to turn away 
from the latter, and to treat them as voluntary outcasts and exiles 
from the covenant of God's promise — then it was apparent that a 
new community was there coming into being ; a community differing 



8 

essentially from the Jewish, in embracing all those who recognized 
and accepted Jesus as the Lord ; a community differing, if possible, 
more palpably from all heathen societies, in the majesty and spirit- 
uality of its doctrines, and the beautiful but severe purity of its rule. 
And to this community, peculiar and aggressive, organized by its 
own law, pervaded with its distinctive life, and seeking to extend 
itself in every direction where travel reached and human hearts and 
minds were active, was given the Name which was caught from the 
word that was oftenest on the lips of those who belonged to it. 

It was given, it would seem, by the Romans at first; since it is 
formed after their manner, and since the Jews would never have 
allowed the prophetic word Christ — which had to them, as it has to 
us, a sacred significance — to be used in such derision. They had a 
name too for Paul and his associates, which made this superfluous. 
They called them "Nazarenes;" and a scornful hiss was on the lip of 
each Jew as he uttered the word. But as from Herod Herodian 
came, so from Christ came in like manner Christian, to heathen lips ; 
and doubtless the populace of Antioch caught it, as giving them a 
new momentary sensation, and Syrian, Greek, and Roman alike 
became rapidly familiar with the term of reproach. It was to them 
not morally so offensive as the name of Jesuit is to us ; but loaded 
with a dislike yet more prompt and utter, and a contempt more com- 
plete, than this awakens. And the wildest dream of drunkenness or 
delirium could hardly have seemed to them so incredible as the 
thought that that name should in little more than two centuries 
and a half become the supreme title of honor of the Emperor of the 
World ; that the religion it represented should have subordinated 
the state to its maintenance and extension ; and that the word from 
which came the title whose sneer was so titillating, represented in a 
mystic monogram, enclosed within a crown of gold, and borne on the 
top of a cruciform standard, should be revered by imperial armies, 
and dreaded by their enemies, as the sign by which the empire con- 
quered. 

It was an early instance, followed since by multitudes of others, 
in which the ribald wrath of man was made to praise the very 
King whom it sought to dishonor. And looked at thoughtfully, the 
little fact seems almost to hold in it a prediction of His triumph 



9 

over all opposition, and the progress of the world towards His mil- 
lennium. 

But passing now from the special consideration of the facts re- 
ported to us by the text, you observe that we have in it an incidental 
but distinct illustration of the primitive method of evangelizing the 
world. The first disciples and teachers of Christianity taught in 
the cities ; and they there preached Jesus as the Savioue of the 
would, with such energy, zeal, and faithful persistency, that they 
took from this fact their very name among men. These are the 
points of general truth suggested by the text, and these are the 
points on which for a little I would detain your attention. 

They taught in the cities. Take Paul's career, in illustration 
of their method. 

At first at Damascus, near which he had been converted, he had 
naturally remained, both learning and expounding the new truth 
which had mastered him, and of which he was to be so noble a min- 
ister. Thence, after his prolonged sojourn in Arabia for meditation 
and study, he went to Jerusalem, that there the fierce and passionate 
persecutor who had haled men and women, delivering them to prison 
for Jesus' sake, might publicly avow his allegiance to that Jesus, and 
admonish the nation of his claim on their reverence. From thence, 
being repulsed by the instant and intense animosity of the Jews, he 
departed to Tarsus ; and thence, at the solicitation of Barnabas, he 
now came to Antioch, and abode there a year with the disciples, 
teaching and preaching. His first systematic work as a minister was 
thus performed in this city, in which ' the lively licentiousness of the 
Greeks was blended,' says Gibbon, 'with the Syrian softness/ but 
from which, nevertheless, Nicolas the proselyte had been taken 
before as one of the seven almoners or deacons, in which the Gospel 
had been preached by the disciples who were scattered abroad after 
Stephen's martyrdom, in which the Greeks as well as the Jews had 
heard its message, and in which Luke was already preparing for his 
subsequent work as the apostolical historian. 

From this city Paul went forth on his first extensive missionary 
tour, and hither he returned when that was completed. His second 
journey, on the same great errand, was here in like manner com- 
menced and ended. And the same populous and profligate capital, 



10 

now no doubt in all its parts familiar to his eye, was again his start- 
ing-point when he entered on that third tour, whose termination he 
found in the two years' imprisonment at Cesarea. On these very 
tours for spreading the tidings of Redemption through the earth — all 
prepared for them as that was by being subjected to one Roman 
power, and being instructed in one refined language, and by having 
outgrown every system of heathenism — he preached chiefly in the 
cities. He did not neglect, indeed, the remote rural districts through 
which he passed. He taught, rather, everywhere ; and with the same 
fervor of argument and appeal, the same admirable aptness and ful- 
ness of illustration, with which he preached at Athens or at Corinth, 
he taught in Galatia, Phrygia, Cappadocia, in the little obscure vil- 
lages of Lycaonia and of Mysia, among the passes and over the 
plains of Macedonia certainly, and at length perhaps of Spain. And 
everywhere he unfolded the true nature of the Gospel, and brought 
the pressure of his exuberant emotional nature, and of his magnificent 
intellectual force, to turn men to God as revealed in his Son. But 
still chiefly in the cities he proclaimed Christ's salvation. 

At Salamis, and at Paphos, at Philippi, Thessalonica, in the 
agora and on the rocky Areopagus at Athens, at Corinth, where he 
abode a year and a half — that • wealthy, brilliant, and voluptuous 
town, the ornament by its splendor, but the scandal for its vicious- 
ness, of the world which was enchained by its fascinating lusts; at 
Ephesus, at Cesarea, again at Jerusalem, again at Corinth, last of all 
in the imperial city, the great metropolis of learning, fame, riches, 
power, which drew to itself the obedience of the world, and gathered 
its tributary streams from all provinces — at each in turn, at this 
finally, Paul preached to men the Gospel. The intervals were few in 
his crowded life in which his voice was not heard in some city of the 
empire. Of the four great centres of the earliest churches, Jerusalem, 
Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, we instantly associate him personally 
with three, and through his companion Apollos with the fourth. 

And the reason for this his method is obvious. It was not a pur- 
poseless or fortuitous thing. It was the result of a divine plan, 
whose wisdom was illustriously shown in the issue. It was not that 
the souls assembled in the cities were more precious than those 
which were sparsely distributed on the slopes of Lebanon, or in the 



11 

far sequestered valleys where herdsmen tended their flocks in Galatia. 
It was not merely, though it may have been in part, because he pre- 
ferred the stir and enterprise of a city like Corinth, to the monotony 
of village life ; or because in the cities vice rose to a fiercer and more 
riotous exhibition, and challenged more defiantly his intrepid assault. 
But it was also, chiefly, because at these points, the foci of the state, 
he met the concentrated energy of heathenism, and encountered 
representatives of all opinions and manners from all parts of the 
earth. At them therefore the impression of his truths was most im- 
mediate, while from them he could distribute .his influence across all 
lands. The man who was speaking at Lystra or Derbe was speaking 
usually to those alone who immediately heard him. His words might 
fall indeed on the quick and responsive mind of a Timothy, who 
should afterwards repeat and widely proclaim the Gospel they de- 
clared. But except in some such extraordinary case, the instruc- 
tions of the apostle were there limited in their reach to the audience 
before him. But the man who was standing on the isthmus at Cor- 
inth, touched the west and the east ; reached Rome with one hand, 
and Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria with the other. The man who 
was speaking from Mars' hill at Athens, had the world for his audi- 
ence ; and when he declared, amid the perfect splendor of those tem- 
ples before whose very blackened ruins art still bows, that God, who 
made the heavens and the earth, and who made all the nations of 
the earth of one blood, dwelleth not in temples made with hands, 
although they be venerable and beautiful as these, the temple of 
Theseus and the temple of Mars, the Erectheion and the Parthe- 
non, he was uttering a truth which was certain to be scattered, by 
the minds which received it and the schools which were before it, for 
the whole earth to hear. The impression of a scene so eminent as 
that would never pass afterwards from the thought of mankind. And 
the truth thus uttered, circulating along the manifold lines of inter- 
course and of commerce, would not cease to appeal to human hearts 
till history itself had ceased to be written. 

Therefore it was that wisely and well the great apostle took cities 
for his pulpits, and preached in them, chiefly and first, the Gospel 
which he proclaimed, and which he sought to make universal. And 
the fruits of this are seen in the rapid extension of the domain of 



12 

Christianity, which, before his death, within thirty years from the 
date of his conversion, from being apparently a mere schism among 
the Jews, had shown itself a separate and world-conqnering power, 
and had as such become recognized and feared, wherever it was not 
hailed and accepted. At first it was a heresy at which Pharisees 
sneered ; at last it was a power with which Emperors had to grapple, 
and before whose onset their tyrannies went down into bloody 
destruction. And in part this was owing to the method of the apostle. 
To strike at the centres of trade, of population, of fashion, and of in- 
fluence — at the points from which all forces radiated, and where one 
standing could touch the whole series of interlinked provinces — this 
was not Paul's method alone. It was the wise and inspired proce- 
dure of those who wrought with him. And for all time their example 
remains to those who in faith and in works do follow them. 

Antioch itself, that most luxurious and licentious of towns, became 
the mother of churches for Asia. Ignatius, its chief pastor, repre- 
sented its faith in the Roman amphitheatre. Chrysostom was born 
in it, and trained in its schools, and disciplined by the austerities of 
the hermits who surrounded it, to be the bishop of Constantinople. 
In the reign of Theodosius, its Christians numbered a hundred thou- 
sand. A peculiar school of theology sprang up in it, stimulating to 
more thorough study of the Scriptures. Its liturgy divided the East 
with that of Alexandria. It was read and sung, and its canticles 
were chanted, throughout the provinces inhabited by Greeks. The 
influence of its patriarch was recognized and felt from Byzantium 
to the Euphrates. 

The primitive disciples taught in the cities; and at each of 
them they preached Christ: with such earnestness and constancy 
that they took from Him their very name among men. That Jesus 
of Nazareth, whom Pilate had crucified, was the very Messiah of 
ancient prophecy, the proper King and Lord of the world, through 
whom Israel was to rise to its spiritual supremacy, and in whose 
reign the whole earth should be blessed; that having from the begin- 
ning shared the glory of the Father, He, by a true and divine incar- 
nation, had come into the world to manifest God to it, and to intro- 
duce into it a new principle and power of spiritual life; that in his 
words God's wisdom was revealed, and in his miracles, God's omnip- 



13 

otence; that by his mysterious suffering and death, atonement was 
made for human sin ; and by his resurrection from the dead, the gates 
of heaven, opened before, were shown wide open, and the luminous 
pathway to them revealed, along which all who believed him might 
follow f — this was the substance of the teachings of Paul, and of all 
the apostles. It was not the Church, and its authority, which they 
preached. It was not a system of scientific theology. It was the 
story of the Divine Lord. In it were those transcendent facts — sur- 
passing all fancies and dreams of men, making the very Hebrew 
expectation, to say nothing of the heathen, look dull and dark before 
their splendor, exalting the world to new relations to higher spheres, 
inaugurating an era glorious and final in the history of mankind — 
in it were these facts, which at first had softened and quickened their 
hearts, and inspired their minds, and which afterwards they pro- 
claimed as the means of converting and transforming the world. 

The philosophy of human nature, and of the Divine being and 
government, which was indissolubly associated with these facts, and 
which on the one hand interpreted them, while equally on the other 
illustrated by them — this, also, was involved of course in their teach- 
ings ; and its complete and clear exposition constitutes a large part of 
some of their epistles. But still the facts themselves were their chief 
theme; to which they ever returned with joy, from which they derived 
their most stimulating motives, which they found most effective over 
men's hearts. And therefore they proclaimed them. Before philoso- 
phers and soldiers, before governors and the populace, on the crowned 
and glittering heights of Athens and on the level beach at Miletus, 
before Paulus, before Felix, and at Caesar's tribunal, Paul preached 
of Christ. It was the theme which occupied his soul from the hour 
when he saw the glory out of heaven, and ^ieard the words in the 
Hebrew tongue, till the hour when he joined with prophets and psalm- 
ists in the song of the Lamb. And in the last epistle which he wrote, 
just before he was beheaded, to the youthful Timothy, his son in the 
gospel, he could say, as he looked back on all the course of his ear- 
nest ministry, rough with the toils and manifold vicissitudes of an 
arduous experience, yet brightened all the way by his love for the 
Master : " I have fought a good fight ; I have finished my course ; I 
have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of 



14 

righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at 
that day. And not to me only," he adds, in that spirit of boundless 
benevolence which never forgot his brethren of mankind, " and not 
to me only, but unto all them also that love His appearing." His 
noble course of wise endeavor thus nobly ended, he went from the « 
city which Nero ruled, to the new Jerusalem in which Christ was/ 
the Lord; from the prison to the palace; from the service of Christ, 
to His vision and reward. 

In both the particulars which I have thus indicated, and which 
are suggested by the record of the text, the example of Paul, and of 
the teachers associated with him, demands, my Brethren, our imi- 
tation. And speaking to-night to this Christian Association, on its 
twelfth anniversary, I have thought of no theme more pertinent, 
more important, or more practical than this. As they did who were 
earliest the representatives of Christ, in a world which was set in 
antagonism to him, and in which all the powers of evil had gained 
such vast and fixed ascendency, so we who follow them, in these 
later ages, and in these remote lands, must continue/ to do, if we 
would fulfil our duty to the Master, if we would make his Gospel of 
truth supreme in the earth. We must preach of Him, by lip and life, 
by word and book, in churches and through charities, publicly and 
in private ; and must preach Him IN the cities, to which God has 
brought us, and in which by his providence our residence has been 
fixed. 

We must preach Him in the cities ; for nowhere else is the need 
of this greater, and nowhere else are the opportunities for doing it 
more numerous and inviting, and from no other points on earth will 
the influence of it extend so widely. A new sense of responsibility, 
and of privilege as well, should be born within us, and should quicken 
our hearts, as we contemplate the fact. 

All the causes which conspired to build up cities in the day of St. 
Paul, to make them powerful as the agents of civilization, or splendid 
as its exponents, are now operating, remember, with greater energy, 
celerity, and extensiveness ; and are coming to their result in towns 
more brilliant, and more influential, and hardly less vicious, than 
those in which his ministry was performed. Take this metropolis in 
illustration of the truth. — Where the narrow Mediterranean spread 



15 

forth before Antioch, there stretches before us the expanse of an 
ocean, to the men of that century terrible and unsearchable, but 
which, in all its coasts and islands, in the coral reefs that rise through 
it, in even the sunken rocks which it enfolds, is now known to navi- 
gation. And not this only : there spreads forth also, connected with 
this, that other mightier and less turbulent sea which heaves its tides 
bcross three sevenths of the circumference of the globe, and washes 
shores to which the arms of Antigonus or Antiochus, of Augustus 
himself, had never sent a single rumor. All the world is thus opened 
to that out-running enterprise which here has its seat. Every 
fourth day through the year there come to us voices from the whole 
area of the inhabited earth. The political, commercial, and social 
influences which here are established, send abroad in reply their 
powerful impression. 

We have the most marvellous apparatus of instruments with 
which to assist and to consummate these tendencies. Instead of the 
few and timorous boats whicli tardily descended from Antioch by 
the Orontes, till they tremulously tossed on the Mediterranean, 
there go from us with every morning those statelier ships that shall 
wrestle with seas and wildest winds, and from the contest come 
out unharmed; there go those almost animated ships, more tireless 
and swift than the old triumphal chariots of the games, within which 
pants that swarthy giant who rears so much of all that is proudest, 
and moves so ceaselessly all that is swiftest, in our civilization. And 
instead of the solitary pass of the Taurus, along whose narrow and 
rocky defiles the caravans descended to bear to Antioch their scanty 
burdens, there flow to us through liquid channels, hollowed by man 
or framed by God, there rush upon us, over ways made level and 
smooth as floors, in caravamtrains whose tread thunders equal and 
steady as a star's, from all the expanded districts and states that 
make the interior, their exuberant wealth. 

Here then shall grow — it is inevitable, my Friends, we see already 
the presages of it — more swiftly than at Antioch, a population more 
vast, heterogeneous, mighty, and far more effective on the destinies 
of the world. From every land shall come travellers to this centre. 
They come already ; from Indies, whose messengers never found the 
Greek cities ; from regions more remote than Tarshish and its isles, 



\ 



16 

or far Cathay. From Southern spice islands, where winds breathe 
balm, and the heavens sparkle with a tropical brilliancy; from polar 
snows, where freezing winds chase wild beasts to their lair, and con- 
geal the currents of human life ; from both alike they come to us, 
and daily jostle in our thronged streets. More rapidly, and more 
variously, shall this great centre be filled with its inhabitants than 
was possible anywhere before Christ came ; till millions shall be 
needed to compute the population which hardly two generations ago 
was sixty thousand. Irishmen, Englishmen, Scotchmen, Welshmen, 
Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Switzers, 
Danes, Norwegians, Russians, Hungarians, Turks, Syrians, Egyp- 
tians, Chinamen, Africans, South Americans, Sandwich islanders, Sin- 
galese — all these are included to-day among the multitudes to whom 
this city gives room and rest ; while the eager and teeming Ameri- 
can people, from east and west, from north and south, throws in each 
year fresh thousands to increase them. Already, it has been esti- 
mated, that eighty dialects are spoken in this democratic air ; and in 
six of them, at least, daily or weekly newspapers are published, 
which have ready sale and a wide circulation. Idolatries have their 
shrines here, as well as Christianity. The Chinese joss-house con- 
fronts the church ; and the costumes and the customs of far-scattered 
tribes are equally familiar upon our streets. 

Nor only in population are these cities to grow thus; are they 
beginning to exhibit this vast augmentation. In wealth too, in splen- 
dor, in all that can minister to luxurious ease, and all that can tempt 
or stimulate appetite, in all that can nurse the viciousness of men, in 
all that can give commercial power, as swift and great shall be their 
increase. You see it already. Amid these very years of war the 
surge of wealth rolls out around us, square after square; and the 
crests of that wave are mansions so splendid that the princes of An- 
tioch might well exchange their palaces for them. All wealth must be 
accumulated under free, democratic, and commercial institutions — 
where production goes on incessantly and most widely, where labor is 
honorable, where invention is tireless, and where the government of 
beneficent laws is equal and uniform — all wealth must accumulate with 
a speed, to an extent, impossible in those ages when war was the 
rule and peace the exception, and when the capricious tyranny of 



17 

the despot might at any time interrupt with confiscation and robbery 
the most orderly progress of the family or the state. Even temporary 
reverses, which check this advance, and seem to threaten its arrest, 
are only as rainy days in summer, which howl through the leaves 
for a little time as if winter had come again, which make the gar- 
dens shed their blooms, and corn-sheaves droop their silken tassels, 
but which pour a fresh vitality through nature, and bless it by inter- 
rupting a too withering glare. With only too great rapidity and 
abundance shall wealth accumulate at these thronged centres of 
modern commerce. 

And with it shall come also art and invention, in their harmo- 
nious and connected departments, to be the ministers and interpre- 
ters of its tastes, and in turn to train it to finer issues. Institutions 
of learning, academies, universities, collections of art and every 
science, libraries, museums, professional schools — all these shall be 
gathered, not instantly, but gradually, by a law that is spiritual, and 
yet that controls the forces which it affects as the rule of gravitation 
draws the stream towards the sea; until immeasurably more ample 
in all the apparatus and equipment of society shall be these cities, 
than were any of the age in which Paul preached; and far more in- 
fluential, wherever the relations of their commerce extend. 

Remember, then, how the supremacy of thought over military 
force is characteristic of our civilization — except in times of rebellion 
like the present, which have not been before, and which shall not 
be again till the continent sinks, when the last cannonade which 
already has commenced shall have signalled their end ; — how the bal- 
lot takes the place of the bayonet and sabre, and the press is instead 
of squadrons of cavalry. Remember what means of distributing 
thought we have and use, of which the ancients had no conception ; 
how every ship that swings out to the main from yonder piers may 
bear whole armories of the thought of this land, of the thought of 
this age, between its decks. Remember how languages are beiDg 
reduced to alphabetical form, more than two hundred of them having 
already some literary resources ; and how interlaced these languages 
are becoming, so that now most distant and dissimilar nations have 
certain common forms of speech, while our own ancient English 

tongue is swiftly gaining a prevalence on the earth even wider than 

2 



18 

the Greek had when Paul preached in it. Remember these things, 
and you see at once how mighty and how wide is the power of these 

CITIES. 

And then remember that behind these instruments and vehicles 
of thought there stands a people, the majority of it — unlike the 
mixed and sensual mass of Greeks, Romans, Syrians, Jews, who made 
the majority of the population of Antioch — united in the sentiment 
of the authority of justice as between man and man, in the sentiment 
of reverence for liberty as man's birthright, and of reverence for 
Christianity as God's revelation, and eager to inform and to trans- 
form the world through these ideas ; and you see again what an emi- 
nent pulpit this metropolis is, in which and from which to preach 
Christ to mankind. He who preaches Him here, preaches to India, 
China, Japan, to Kamtschatka and Labrador, to the Society islands, 
to Borneo and Siam. He sweeps not merely that " many-nation ed 
sea " the Mediterranean ; but round the world, on every coast, is felt 
the far vibration of his influence. ' Not an axe falls in the Ameri- 
can forest,' said the English statesman long ago, 'but it sets in mo- 
tion a shuttle in Manchester.' Not a voice speaks for Christ, we 
may say as well, in these central American cities, but its echo is 
heard, sometime or other, wherever the shuttle sends its fabric, wher- 
ever the traveller pierces the jungle, wherever the dawn of a Chris- 
tian civilization begins to disperse the heathen night. 

And, finally, to complete this series of suggestions, remember the 
peril, as well as the privilege, which comes with such vast congrega- 
tions of men, diverse from each other in origin and in habit, only 
drawn together by the common attraction of ambition for wealth, 
and with the force of sin in each perhaps trained and invigorated 
by his contact with others. The lesson we consider seems then 
doubly emphasized. — All communities of men need Christianity in 
the midst of them, for their peace and security, as well as for their 
culture. A democratic population needs it, if possible, even more 
than one organized around more ancient and fixed institutions. But 
of all democratic populations on the earth, not one so instantly and 
so palpably requires it as does the free, self-governed city ; where local 
attachments, and ancestral associations, possess no power; where 
the ignorant and the profligate drift together in swarms, by a natural 



19 

gravitation ; where multitudes shield in a dangerous obscurity indi- 
vidual ruffians ; where the ministers of the law may be the choice of 
the rabble ; and where vice grows always more fierce and more proud 
through an unchecked indulgence. We should know beforehand 
that such a city, except as restrained and reformed by the Gospel, 
would tend to become a very Sodom; and we ourselves have seen 
that it does so. Your own experience has lately declared it, with a 
vividness that cannot be soon forgotten. Your own eyes have seen — 
as men looking down into uncapped craters see vast volcanic waves 
of fire raging and hissing underneath, — your own eyes have seen 
what a hell upon earth the finest and foremost American cities may 
instantly become, when a furious popular passion is excited, when 
law is set aside and its agents are either purchased or paralyzed, 
and when the Gospel has gained no supremacy in them. And till you 
forget your own identity, you will not be likely to forget that fierce 
lesson. To talk of the duty of making Christianity here prevalent 
and supreme, in the light of our own experience of its need, seems 
wholly superfluous. It is talking of the duty of abstaining from so- 
cial suicide ; of the duty of maintaining our civic existence. And the 
impression of the scenes to which I have referred can hardly pass 
away, till all the events and the duties of this life have ceased to 
engage any longer our thoughts. 

Look forward, then, and observe that there is nothing more certain 
in American society, than that many chief forces and tendencies of 
it conspire rapidly to build up such cities ; to drain the country for 
their increase, and subsidize, other lands to supply them; to make 
them proud, powerful, and profligate, the most fitting places in all the 
earth for the Gospel to be preached in ; there is nothing more cer- 
tain than that all these influences are only to be energized, and made 
still wider and swifter in their working, by the very war through 
which we are passing ; and that when it has had and closed its dreary 
day, the cities will be found more thronged, more attractive, and more 
turbulent and passionate than ever before ; — and there will be nothing 
more certain, I think, to every mind, than that the example of the prim- 
itive teachers is by us to be followed ; that we are to labor to make 
the Gospel supreme in these centres, with most emphatic and constant 
endeavor. 



20 

We should not neglect one spot on earth. We should not leave 
an island unvisited, or one remote shore untraversed bj the mis- 
sionary, where zeal can carry and love sustain him. But we should 
plant first, chiefest, most conspicuously, at the centres of commerce, 
population, and wealth, at the centres as well of organized sin, all 
the influences that there can enlighten and purify. As the rays of 
the sun are concentrated on the focus, till the stubbornest metal 
melts beneath them, so the efforts of Christians should be combined 
upon cities, with a redoubled and constant energy, till the whole 
population has felt its power. 

The efforts of Christians : and their efforts, you observe, in this 
one direction of preaching Christ, as did the apostles ; until they 
also shall be distinguished among men, not as successful in com- 
merce or the professions ; not as politicians, as scholars, or as gentle- 
men, ornaments of society, or props of the state, but as believers in 
the Son of the Most High, who are aiming to bring the whole world 
to receive Him. 

I open no controversy in this remark — as surely I can have no 
other relation than one of entire respect and love, of cordial, grate- 
ful, and admiring sympathy — with those numerous and greatly 
beneficent institutions which have sprung into being in a few years 
past, to relieve in a measure human want; to administer aid and 
healing in sickness ; to give homes to the houseless, cheer to the de- 
spondent, instruction to the ignorant, and a refuge to the tempted. 
All these are not only most useful and noble, in design and in work, 
they are Christ-like and divine. The very genius of the Christian 
religion is brightly expressed in them. They are better than cathe- 
drals as its exponents and instruments, and to every thoughtful ob- 
server more imposing. Nay, more than this : they are the almost ani- 
mate representatives of the Lord. Through them the Master still 
walks the earth, touching as of old the blind and the deaf, releasing 
the lame and restoring the sick, and unloosing the manacled lips of 
the dumb ; and the series of His miracles, in the spirit they reveal- 
ed, if not in the very power they involved, is perpetuated in them. 

But I have sometimes thought, or feared, that in the midst of 
such enterprises as these, sublime as they are, and most fruitful 
of good, while engaged with all enthusiasm and joy in their proseeu- 



21 

tion, we might perhaps lose sight to some extent of the primary im- 
portance of preaching Christ; of preaching Him by books and 
tracts and Bibles ; of preaching Him by a personal ministry to the 
destitute, and by fixed and recurrent public services, in the hall and 
the chapel, as well as in the church on this His day. This is spiritual, 
and not physical, in its power and operation ; and so we are tempted 
sometimes to underrate it. It is familiar, and so we forget it, and 
exalt to a relatively undue importance the more infrequent and im- 
pressive institutions. But because it is invisible, it is also more per- 
vasive than any other influence ; and because it is silent, and essen- 
tially spiritual, it works with the mightiest reformatory energy. It 
is the life beneath the muscle. It is the power within the mechan- 
ism. Nothing can supersede it, for nothing else can fill its office. 

Christ, as the personal centre of the Gospel, to whom all ancient 
prophecies point, whom the narratives record and the epistles de- 
monstrate, the Saviour of the world : not a romantic Hebrew peasant ; 
not a mere inspired sage ; but the one divine Being who has taken 
upon himself our nature and life, and has manifested the Infinite by 
whom we are encompassed ; — Christ, as the author and the patron of 
reform, the perfect example and the constant mediator of all loveli- 
ness and virtue ; in whom the poorest may find friendship, the guilti- 
est forgiveness, and the most defiled an inward cleansing ; whom an- 
gels worship, and saints adore, and whose coming to the earth has 
crowned its years and lands with glory, and yet who is interested in 
each of his followers, is their strength in temptation, their solace in 
sickness, and who comes hereafter to be their Judge ; through whom 
men may be heirs of God, partakers of his nature, partakers of his 
peace, and after this life the participants of his glory ; — He is to be 
preached, as uniting in himself all the attributes of God, and recon- 
ciling them all with the rescue of the sinner ; as offering himself with 
an equal appeal from the cross and from the throne; at once abso- 
lute in law and infinite in pardon; the Lord of the world, and the 
Leader to the heavens. 

There is no other force but this that can penetrate, pervade, and 
build up society in cities like these, and crowd their surface with be- 
nign institutions. The fine ethical schemes have no energy like it ; 
nor have any church forms ; nor has any remoter philosophy of re- 



22 

ligion. Literature, divorced from it, merely tantalizes or tempts ; it 
cannot inly rectify and renew. All political changes, all social 
ameliorations, which do not have this for their basis and their instru- 
ment, are as fleeting as the seasons, and essentially superficial. 

Not only then in churches like this, but everywhere through the 
town, where men are gathered for business or for pleasure, wherever 
they have their workshops or their homes, wherever their life drifts 
forward towards the Future, must Cheist be preached ; — by missiona- 
ries in part, but not by them only; by all Christian men who believe 
in the Lord, and to whom life is given and is precious, that they may 
thus employ it for Him ; to whom speech is given, that royal gift, not 
that they may fritter and waste it upon sport, or dishonor it by pro- 
fanity, or debauch it by untruth, but that they may make it vital and 
noble with the power of Christian truth, and with the force of spiritual 
feeling. When this is done — when young men rise to the greatness 
of their office as living and earnest witnesses for Christ, and when by 
their agency, with that of others, the grace of the Gospel, its infinite 
truths, its great examples, its incomparable offers are seen on all 
sides in vivid exhibition, resident and regnant throughout the city — 
then that city, grow swiftly as it may in population, in power, in 
importance in the world, will be cleansed and pure in proportion to its 
growth. The Spirit of God shall reign within it. The kingdom of 
salvation shall have one of its thrones there. -The tidings of life and 
pardon in the Messiah which there are spoken shall fly from thence, 
as from a pulpit of stone and gold, throughout the earth, as if an 
angel announced them in mid air. And the peace, the security, the 
joy of that city shall be like those which the prophet foresaw in the 
city whose stones were to be laid with fair colors, and its foundations 
with sapphires; whose windows were to be of agates, its gates of 
carbuncles, and all its borders of pleasant stones; for "all thy chil- 
dren shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy 
children." 

The apostolic example thus presents to us a duty as binding as 
that of chastity or of prayer, and as permanent as the tendencies of 
the world's civilization. Better to sink these cities in the sea, than 
not to evangelize them. Better to concentrate our force upon them, 
than to spend it on any other province of the earth. 



Let me leave then, my Brethren, this single thought with you, as 
we separate again from this anniversary ; and let its impression 
remain on your hearts through all your future life in the city. "I 
have spoken unto you, young men," said the apostle, "because ye are 
strong." I have spoken unto you, young men of this city, because 
you have faculty, opportunity, spirit, a long and useful life I trust 
in store for some, for many among you. Be awake then to the great- 
ness of your responsibility ; be alive to your privilege; amid these 
very years of war, to make Christ known here more widely, more 
effectively, than ever before ; and in all the more quiet years to come, 
after the air shall have ceased to be shattered by the echoes of the 
battle, to still proclaim His word of truth, and still maintain and 
further His cause, wherever and while the opportunity offers. In the 
churches with which you are severally associated, be examples to all 
of Christian faith, in labor, in patience, and in large liberality. No 
church on earth is designed by the Master to be a mere place of 
religious enjoyment. Work is its first duty; and enjoyment after- 
wards, as gained through that work, is its privilege and reward. It 
is not a Sybaritic retreat from the world ; it is a seminary of all good 
effort. It is a fort, and not a parterre of spiritual flowers ; a position 
in battle, not a play-ground. Least of all is a church in such cities 
as these, whose daily commerce traverses the globe, whose hourly 
converse involves the use of scores of languages, whose elements of 
evil as well as of good are all eager and strenuous, a place for any 
religious dilettanteism — any selfish, indolent, epicurean Christianity. 
The largest plans are those most germane to it. The most vigorous 
effort to accomplish these plans alone befits its place and office. 
Enthusiasm is for us the soberest reason. Vigilance and self-sacri- 
fice become our customary duties. And every one in such a church 
should feel that he is in a part of the field of the world where the 
contest is most urgent, where duty is doubled, and where to fail or 
to sleep on his post were the fearfulest treachery. 

But not in the church only is this work to be done. A Christian 
man, if once impressed with the theme we have considered, will find 
means, opportunities, incitements everywhere, to his duty to the Mas- 
ter. He will manifest Christ, and teach men of Him, wherever he goes. 
In business and in pleasure, in conversation and in life, on the pave- 



24 

raent and the pier, as well as in the church, the field is open, the call 
is constant for his exhibition of the life, the rule, and the spirit of the 
Lord. Probity in business, to one's own disadvantage, is better 
than any sermon or treatise illustrating the law of Christian integ- 
rity. A sweet and spotless life of love is a new evangel that inter- 
prets the old. The man who always honors the Master, in his works 
as in his words, sings hymns, as did the early Christians, in the work- 
shop and the counting-room, to Him as to God. And he who accepts 
and fulfils this office, although his voice is not heard in the streets, and 
the sacraments are dispensed by other hands, is working with apos- 
tolic means to fulfil a mission than which the apostles' was not more 
high. He represents a Master whom the city most needs for its 
own preservation. He articulates a message which the multitudes 
around him need more than they need those tidings of victory which 
they watch for so eagerly ; more than the tales of wealth and success 
which to them make speakers seem 'golden-mouthed;' — a message 
which commerce shall charge herself with carrying, and which the 
long and widening civilization that radiates from these centres shall 
not outlast, and shall never outrun. In the heraldry of heaven, the 
captains of the earth will have no place of precedence like his, who 
in these growing American cities has done his part to make the word 
of Christ supreme. And in the coming illustrious Future, which day 
by day is drawing nearer, of which each spring is but a witness, and 
every sunset a new promise, and which holds the immense and 
immortal reward for all we have here endured and done — to have 
wrought in this work will be a privilege which the seraphim shall 
covet ; to have died in its performance will have been our coronation ! 
That such may be your life and work, and such your vast and 
bright Hereafter, may God in his great grace permit! And unto 
Him be, now and ever, from all His church, continual praise. 
Amen. 






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